For Your Consideration - 07.12.12

The fact that, last week, West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s new show, The Newsroom, had a TV journalist mention an alternative newsweekly in Spokane called the Pacific Northwest Insider should have me loving this show, but instead, there’s a better reason to watch: To mock. Sorkin means for his characters to come across as brilliant minds speaking “truth to stupid,” but instead they all come across as the rich-snob-villains in a frat-boy comedy. You’re just waiting for a ragtag group of slacker slobs to give them their comeuppance.

GAME

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Angry Birds has finally shown that all of America adores the “Pig Slaughter” genre, paving the way for a much more enjoyable game: Kamikaze Pigs. The premise is intuitive: Kill as many pigs —driving or flying in military vehicles — with a single shotgun blast. The name of the game is chain reaction: Purchase a few upgrades and you’ll have helicopter rotors flinging off into tanks that fire rockets into planes that crash into trucks of jetpack-pigs. And everywhere, the smell of bacon.

BOOK

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If there’s a link between domestic cyber-terrorism and Internet memes, it can be found at the fringes of Anonymous, the amorphous band of online vigilantes that have taken down credit card websites, gone head-to-head with the church of Scientology and exposed the most private of material. We Are Anonymous goes a long-way in showing the faces behind the Guy Fawkes masks. There’s ego, mischief, anarchy and, perhaps, cats with a deep yearning for cheeseburgers.